Hedley

First of all, you got the Hedley reference, but it isn’t one of the best movies, it is THE best movie.

I didn’t say that I wouldn’t be affected by all of this, I said that I wouldn’t be furloughed. I’m going to be taking a large reduction in pay, and having been furloughed, broke, started over with small kids, etc, I consider myself very fortunate to only be taking a pay cut this time. I would agree that global government mandates caused a significant part, if not most of our problems, but they also created the same problems for countless others in our society. The government restrictions cant be blamed for all of our problems either. Public fear had caused reservations to tank before the first government restrictions were put into place. Even if we opened up unrestricted global travel today, public fear of travel would still hammer future bookings. At this point the lack of a proven vaccine and/or cure has as much of an impact on demand as government restrictions. Why should we ask the American citizens to subsidize our industry until things come back, yet leave the small business owner and all of those who worked for that person to twist in the wind? I don’t want to diminish what airline families are facing. Many of us have been there before, some more than once, and it’s always painful, but does reducing our pain deserve taxpayer funding while many more lose everything they’ve ever worked for and get nothing?

I don’t think that the senior battle scared people don’t care about others, it’s that they have been through this many times and they are just numb now. They were the biggest company cheerleaders when they got hired, and were sure that they’d never be the grumpy old guy. After living an airline career and watching what those before you went through, it isn’t that you’re insensitive to the junior pilots today, it’s just that you have come to realize that we went into this with visions of making millions, flying cool planes, and traveling to exotic places, but found a brutal, take no prisoners industry instead.

Deathray

1. The airline industry is deemed essential to our national economy (mail, militarily/government movement, medical supplies, business)

2. Laws and regulations placed upon us by gov’t require special training for licensing and operations

3. Airline industry personnel vote in every state throughout the union.

rickair7777

The pilots are only a tiny drop in the bucket. The optics and politics are all about the vast majority of airline employees who are relatively low income (and heavily unionized). The party that favors unions cannot simply cut out the pilot unions because they make too much... kind of defeats the whole point of unions if you get punished for success by the party which advocates for unions... especially since pilot unions do tend to endorse said party.

TFAYD

nobody blinked and eye when Compass, TSA and now XJT went south.

the assets will be redeployed, new crews hires and trained and things will continue just fine.

there will be more noise if United goes away but it doesnt exactly create a supply shortage anywhere if that happened.

The others can easily cover any “essential” mail, mil/gov obligations.

eventually the assets will be redeployed elsewhere and business goes on.

Hedley

He gets it. Braniff, Eastern, and Pan Am all went away, the remaining airlines picked the carcass clean, and the world kept spinning. The infrastructure isn’t in jeopardy, the assets are still there, and the market can redistribute them as needed. Believing in free markets and capitalism is kind of like having a religious faith. It is easy to believe when the world is going your way. The test is if you still believe when life kicks you in the junk.

Downtime

I would also add CARES give money to a lot more then just airlines. We are a tiny portion of it.

FXLAX

Out of curiosity, when was the last time and which pilot union endorsed a certain party?


I’ve never heard them say that. FedEx got rid of the amazon contract precisely because of the opposite, low yield cargo. Their high yield cargo is all B2B, which amazon doesn’t really do.

Deathray

i was talking about the airline industry as a whole.

tallpilot

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-rele...300346764.html

ALPA National stayed out of the 2016 fight but ALPA is an affliate of the AFL-CIO.

https://aflcio.org/press/releases/af...nton-president

Hedley

ALPA endorsed Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Barack Obama to name a few. I couldn’t find an official reference from ALPA endorsing Hilary Clinton, just Facebook and non official social media stuff.